If the United States makes corn-based ethanol the centerpiece of its biofuel portfolio, the Gulf of Mexico's vast dead zone will expand and become impossible to control, says a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Continue reading "Corn-Based Biofuels Spell Death for Gulf of Mexico" »
Tuesday morning, I'll be up early in Austin, speaking on a panel about new green gadgets and online tools, like this bamboo phone with a hand-powered whirling charger, which is a finalist in Inhabitat's Greener Gadgets Design Competition.
Along with Sarah Rich of Dwell and Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm, we're going to cover ways that you can use technology to get what you want out of life while decreasing your impact on the world around you. Actually, you're probably already doing some good things you haven't thought about in "environmental" terms. For example, watching your movies on iTunes instead of buying a DVD is a great example of the dematerialization -- where you buy some electrons instead of an industrial product. Of course, pushing all that data uses energy, but there are emerging green data centers that efficiently use clean, renewable power, so we'll be talking about those too.
We'll also be briefly glossing some of the things you see me write about here, like the importance of industrial processes/materials, new utility power plant tech, and even a touch of policy (though not too much, I promise). If you're going to SXSW, I hope you can pull yourself out of the spring break madness, swing by, and politely jeer.
Image: Courtesy of Jill Fehrenbacher, Inhabitat's head honcho.
Solar-power-plant company Ausra has released a paper claiming that solar-thermal electric technology can provide 90 percent of U.S. grid electricity, with enough left over to power a fleet of plug-in electric vehicles. The company estimates that such a changeover would eliminate 40 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions with a land footprint of 9,600 square miles, about the size of Vermont (thanks, Kent).
The key to the scenario, however, is developing the ability to store energy for 16 hours, thus creating a stable power source through cloudy periods and the night, a feat that has so far eluded engineers.
"If we can do storage," Ausra CEO Bob Fishman said, "We can take on coal."
The paper says Ausra expects to commercialize its energy-storage technology within two years. A prototype of the system will go into a model plant the company plans to finish this summer in Bakersfield, California, the company's founder, David Mills, told Wired.com.
The new research (.pdf) was presented at the IEA SolarPACES conference in Las Vegas, and is described as peer-reviewed.
Continue reading "Solar Company Says Its Tech Can Power 90 Percent of Grid and Cars" »
Yesterday, Konarka announced that they have demonstrated organic (made of carbon/plastic/oil based products versus silicon/inorganic products) solar cells that can be manufactured using highly efficient ink-jet printing. These solar cells do not require
the clean room processes that silicon cells do and could make it easier to incorporate solar power into many useful applications.
Sounds like a green victory, but CNET reported that the organic cells are so lightweight and flexible Konarka suggested "putting its plastic on soft drink bottles in stores for advertising." While I appreciate that Konarka needs to generate a lot of "market" to turn a profit for the considerable amount invested in them, I don't think that adding plastic solar cells and screens on the outside of disposable soft drink bottle is consistent with the sustainable promise of the company and their technology.
Creating solar power collecting windows on the other hand (a previously announced Konarka product plan), now that sounds like a good idea...
Continue reading "InkJet-Printed, Flexible, Organic Solar Cells?" »
The Palo Alto Research Center is famous for creating "the office of the future" back in the 1970s, which, is basically the one that we all work in now. Among other inventions, their researchers lay claim to the mouse and the laser printer. Now, they have turned their research acumen to some cleantech projects including designing concentrators for solar power plants, printing photovoltaic cells on plastics, filtering water without membranes, building energy efficient datacenters, and the humble project of turning air into liquid fuel.
Today, I'm heading down to Palo Alto to check out the facilities with Jon Snyder, our erstwhile photographer. UPDATE: Sadly, PARC's cleantech lead got the flu last night, so our trip down had to be postponed. We're sorry about the false hope, but we've been promised that when we do make it down, it'll be worth our (and your) while. So, still keep your eye out for a gallery and some good posts, they just won't be put up today.
Image: Courtesy of PARC. Researchers standing in front of a solar concentrator prototype.
Georgia Tech scientists have developed a new material that, combined with the right process, could become the cheapest way to separate the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, out of coal plants' smokestacks.
"It's pretty easy and cheap to make and it's got a high capacity for CO2 under realistic conditions," said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech.
Those conditions require a material that can trap CO2 out of a mixture of water vapor, nitrogen, and oxygen (among other things), and then release that carbon dioxide on-demand. Being able to do that cheaply remains a dream, and one that some say will always remain "vaporware."
But scientists are pushing on with the effort to develop the right systems to make coal plants outfitted with carbon capture and sequestration cost-competitive with other future power solutions like solar concentrating plants.
Jones' research appears online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (Update: Link Fixed. Thanks JMB.)
Continue reading "New Material Could Drop Cost of Carbon Capture" »
Nordic Windpower, a two-blade wind turbine company, is planning an April IPO, a company executive revealed to Wired.com last night at an event following the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco.
Eric Thompson, the company's vice-president, did not, however, disclose the amount of capital the company was planning to raise. The public-offering follows last October's "significant" investment in the company by Goldman Sachs, the large investment bank, which has several investments in wind power.
The company's core technology was developed by the Swedish government, hence the California-based company's name. Their wind turbine uses only two blades, instead of the more conventional three, and has been in development since 1975.
The company is hoping to tap into the torrent of capital, up to $37 billion, that is projected to pour into building wind infrastructure this year. GE alone has forecast $6 billion of 2008 revenue from its wind turbines, and wind farm operators, like Spain's Eolia and Portugal's EDP, are also planning IPOs. It could be a big year for wind power, despite the still-tiny role that wind plays in the world's energy infrastructure.
See Also from Wired:
Inherit the Wind
Reaping from the Wild Wind
Map Reveals Airstream Potential
Context:
From Portugal: Another Big Wind IPO? (WSJ)
A Mighty Wind: Eolia Sets IPO (Business Week)
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- As venture capitalists spoke about the importance of green technology to China at the Cleantech Forum today, news broke that pollution had turned a Chinese river "red and bubbly,"
underscoring the importance of cleaning up the world's fastest
growing economy.
The group of investors emphasized the scale of the problem, and the relatively low-tech nature of workable solutions. High-tech is simply too high-cost for the still-developing economy. Simon Littlewood, CEO of London Asia Capital, noted that some European technologies might be 100% more effective than their Chinese counterparts, but they cost 10 times more.
"The Chinese would love to have the best solution, but they'll go for the cost-effective solution," Littlewood said.
The easiest clean technologies to implement, the group said, were in energy efficiency, where newly installed technologies directly translate to decreased energy usage and bills. Both are especially important in China, where wages are still relatively low and two coal plants are coming online per week to meet rising energy demand from newly urban Chinese.
Continue reading "Chinese Cleantech Decidely Low-Tech, Say Investors" »
While new "green" conferences spring up regularly to promote the oft-noted double entendre of green—saving the environment and making money—but this week's Cleantech Forum in San Francisco is the gold-standard for cleantech investors.
The main reason is that previous iterations of the event have been able to deliver the goods--startups with potential--to investors. Since 2002, the conference's sponsor, the Cleantech Group, claims that the events have directly led to $1.1 billion in fundings for the handpicked companies that present.
This year, twenty companies will have six minutes to give their pitches, but Dallas Kachan, a managing director of the group, said the events draw a more eclectic mix of attendees than just venture capitalists.
"The audience is primarily investors, but there are entrepreneurs, policy makers, and scientists as well," Kachan said, "The forum is not simply company presentations. It's an opportunity for the cleantech community to engage with policy makers and each other."
The conference's theme is "Crossing the Chasm: From Roadmap to Purchase Order." After the last few years of growth in green venture investments, investors are itching for their portfolio companies to start generating some revenue. As we noted last year, making that transition is not going to be easy.
Starting tomorrow, we'll be mixing with the more than 900 attendees at the Fairmont to bring you news about the newest solutions to the energy crisis.
Image: flickr/greggoconnell
They're selling the power generated by what they call the world's largest solar plant to Arizona Public Service, the state's primary utility, and they've released the terms of the deal.
With all the talk about the relative costliness renewable energy sources versus coal power, finally, we get some facts. As Todd Woody put it:
The utility will pay around $4 billion over 30 years for the greenhouse gas-free electricity generated by Solana that will light 70,000 homes. That comes to about $133 million a year for the life of the power purchase agreement.
I did a few back of the envelope calculations to see how the plant's kilowatt hour rate stacks up versus the standard solutions. Check the math: $133 million divided by 70,000 homes equals $1,900 per household. The average Arizona household uses 12,424 kilowatt hours of power per year, so the kilowatt hour rate should be around 15 cents per kWh. That's not cheap, but it's not too bad, either. The average American pays about 10.7 cents per kWh. And as Woody notes, the cost of solar is dropping fast as companies scale their prototypes and the costs of components come down.
UPDATE: Cyberian makes a good point in the comments that I neglected to include the markup to consumers. Ok, fine, so let's say the markup is 25 percent. 20 cent per kWh solar is still pretty good.
UPDATE(#2): The numbers here certainly seem squishy, although one of the commenters claims that APS has announced they are paying 14 cents per kwh. Does anyone have a link on that? Also, any of the commenters who work in the industry, I'd love to hear from you privately about the state of the grid where you work.
February 17, 2008 | 12:18:02 PMCategories: AAAS 2008, Energy, Environment, Policy, Politics
BOSTON, Ma - Climate change highlights the interesting relationship that the political world has with science. While almost all scientists say that climate change is occurring, the policies of the worlds biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, continue to make the problem worse, flying in the face of the best available science.
Lawrence Susskind, an MIT professor, presented an easy answer for why this is happening at talk here at the AAAS annual meeting. "We know that politically motivated stakeholders reject scientific analysis that challenges their policy positions," he said. "They reject the science, not just the policy."
Wish as we might, those political motivations aren't going away, so he suggests, we have to learn to deal with them. From the largest resource problems like climate change to much smaller decisions like protecting a wet land while incorporating a suburban development, everyone recognizes that increasingly complex science has not translated well into the public sphere. Susskind, however, thinks that he's developed a framework for making science not just useful but usable in the public sphere.
BOSTON, Ma - Carbon dioxide, the most well-known greenhouse gas, isn't actually a toxic substance. In fact, plants, within some limits, like and use the stuff. The problem,as we know, is with the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Black carbon, on the other hand, is composed of very fine particles of carbon that can be released into the air in aerosol form. They are generally generated by burning some type of biomass, like firewood.
V. (Ram) Ramanathan of the UC-San Diego La Jolla, said that reducing black carbon could play an important role in reducing global climate change here at the AAAS annual meeting. Ramanathan said that a mere 10% reduction in black carbon would be equivalent to eliminating 25 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions. For scale, the world produces about 8 gigatons of CO2 equivalent per year.
Continue reading "The Other Carbon: Reducing Black Carbon's Role in Global Warming" »
BOSTON, Ma. President Bush recently signed a mandate into law requiring that at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels be produced in the US by 2022. But here at the AAAS annual meeting, scientists are questioning the sustainability of farming our way out of using oil.
At the Soil Protection for Sustainable Well Being symposium, several questioners from the audience pressed Luca Montanarella of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in Milan, on whether or not biofuels were a sustainable phenomenon. He demurred, but did note that soil is a finite resource, just like water and oil. That means we will run out of good soil unless we take steps to grow things more wisely.
As I listened to the exchange, a phrase popped into my head for what intensive energy crop farming really is: phytomining the soil. Plants are used to extract carbon from the environment. We then turn that plant biomass into a liquid hydrocarbon that mimics the fossil fuels our entire transportation infrastructure is built on.
Continue reading "AAAS: Phytomining and the Biomass Backlash" »
Scientists claim to have discovered a new compound that will capture damaging carbon dioxide from power plants using a technique commonly used to by the pharmaceutical industry to find new drugs.
The sponge-like material, called ZIF-69, promises to hold 60 times its volume in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas scientists say is primarily responsible for climate change.
The compound, along with twenty-four others like it, were discovered using so-called high-throughput screening, a massively parallel technique for testing chemicals. The new molecule could be used to capture the carbon dioxide generated by power plants when they burn coal, gas, or biomass.
"We're altering the environment irreversibly and something needs to be done or we might not have time to do anything about it," said Omar Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at UCLA, lead author of the paper. "If you can capture carbon dioxide that goes a long way towards a cleaner environment."
Capturing carbon dioxide requires that you can sort that CO2 molecule from other particles. That's a trick that has proven quite difficult. Previous efforts have required heat to trap the carbon dioxide particles. Heat requires energy, and that energy costs money. Making carbon capture more efficient could reduce the cost of the process and bring "cleanish" fossil fuel plants closer to reality.
Continue reading "New CO2 Capturing Material Could Make Plants Cleaner " »
EDITOR: Adam Rogers | email
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